Monkeys, Typewriters...
Monkeys, Typewriters, & Copyright.
Had an excellent conversation with fellow members on the @typed discord about copy minting and language. How do you approach the subject of ownership of the written word?
Right now, @typed is but a mere sapling, yet it's already blossoming with wonderful ideas. As people continue to experiment and test the platform, there is a flurry of minted posts from haiku and poetry to flash fiction, emojis, ASCII, WAGMI's, and GM's. But what happens if someone unknowingly mints the same word(s) as someone else? Is it a harmless coincidence or thinly veiled plagiarism?
In the realm of the NFT, where the importance of ownership and authentication sits alongside the appeal of the asset the token represents, genuineness is the sought-after commodity for any collector's investment. After all, this is a commodity embedded within a financially linked architecture. Art and literature have long been objects of desire and have their fair share of counterfeits attempting to purposely subvert and infiltrate the market.
However, whilst it's most dubious (and unlikely) for someone to suggest they've "accidentally" copied a Renaissance master or an award-winning novel, it is entirely possible for two or more separate people to have the same whimsical thought, then decide to cement their thought with the same amalgamation of words in minted text. What do you do then? If both parties' creations are original, in that they have captured their own individual realisations of the same hypothesis, does that make either creation any lesser? If one is minted sometime before the other should that gain the importance due to length of existence? Possibly, but is the latter post not still considered "original content" in the context of the other writer?
This scenario is of course entirely different from someone wholesale copy-pasting an entire section of prose, article, or journal for instance, where the volume of identical language is far too consistent to be anything other than a straight rip. Such an occurrence is more of an open and shut case.
Should there be a "threshold of understanding" when it comes to minting text and plagiarism, a buffer zone of one sentence, perhaps? Anything up to the first full stop is forgiven, but anything beyond strays into copyminter waters? I do not proclaim to have any answers, but the conversation is important.
When 50 people draw a picture of a forest, you will get 50 unique illustrations.
When 50 people type the word "forest", you will get 50 identical forests.
When 50 people type a short story about a forest, you will get 50 unique "illustrations".
With language, just like art and music, uniqueness and originality come from how you use it.